If you were arrested for selling drugs and sentenced to jail time, would you be lobbying your state or local government to cut the funding for the police department?
Absolutely, at least the drug-enforcement wing of it. Of course, as a Libertarian, I'd do it even if I didn't use drugs. (which I don't)
They are in court because the DOJ believes they broke the law.
And like laws against cocaine use, this is an unjust law, and Microsoft is justified in doing anything necessary (within reason) to fight it. If that includes lobbying for lower DOJ funding, so be it.
Keep in mind that lobbying bans would apply to the "good" people as well as the interest peddlers. The tree-huggers, tax cutters, gun lobbyists, anti-war protestors, free speech advocates, and all the other groups that push legitimate political agendas would be barred from discussion as well. The result would not be that citizens would have more power, but simply that people have to find more clever ways of influencing legislators. Remember that every lobbyist represents *somebody,* and often the lobbyist is representing an honest group of citizens who are taking a position on a real political issue.
I think the result of a ban would be two-fold. First, most of the bad guys would ignore it. There are lots of ways to get around this sort of laws, as the "soft money" fiasco has shown. Adding more restrictions will simply make it easier for the entranched players to harass newcomers, and won't slow the special interests down much sincethey do this sort of thing for a living.
Secondly, it will give more power to the media and to campaign contributers, both of which already have enourmous influence over the system.
So I think a lobbying ban is a stupid idea. There are already laws limiting the most corrupt behaviors, and the rest will have to be dealt with through the electoral process. As long as the government has $2 trillion in goodies to hand out and the power to ruin people's lives, lobbyists will flock to Washington to get their share. Only eliminating the goodies these people are after can solve the problem, and that's not going to happen any time soon.
I must say, I see nothing improper about this. It looks to me like a simple self-defense move. They're doing everything they can to avoid getting screwed over. If the DoJ is going to harass them, why shouldn't they fight back?
and at that time, what would the BULK of PPC buyers have run as an OS on those kick-ass Moto G3 boxes? Certainly not Mac OS, because Moto would have driven their asses out of business.
Why can't Apple just raise the liscencing costs on the new machines to cover some of the losses in their own product line? In the long run, the Mac OS *is* Apple's most valuable asset. Even with the pathetic state System 7 was in, they still had a loyal customer base that was attached more than anything else to Apple's OS. That means that anything Apple could do to grow the platform would have benefitted them in the long run.
Not only that, but giving Moto a stake in the platform would have given them much more incentive to make better PPC chips. And it would benefit Apple by allowing them to share some of the R & D costs. Particularly with the open hardware standards of CHRP, Apple could easily require some kind of technology-sharing arrangement whereby Apple gets to liscence any advances by cloners for cheap.
So I think clone-killing was dumb. The success of the clones was simply proof that Apple's hardware was falling behind the cutting edge. Better to get that lesson from someone who's dependent on you, than to wait for people to start defecting to Wintel, and likely never come back. The clones gave Apple both an alternative revenue stream and a less damaging feedback mechanism and technology source. A flourishing PPC clone market combined with LinuxPPC & Mac OS X would have been very sweet. As it is, the PPC platform can't keep up with the sheer competitiveness of the Wintel world.
Apple screwed Moto over big time when they killed the clones. Moto had a kick-ass G3 system waiting in the wings about 6 months before Apple's own systems were ready, and Apple killed it to prevent the market share loss. That machine was faster than Apple's first G3's months later, so it would've been a major coup for the platform and a major money-maker for Motorolla. Instead, they forced Motorolla to take a loss on all of the R & D costs for the machine so Apple's machines wouldn't look bad. I don't blame Motorolla for being pissed off.
I've found that instability is largely determined by the apps you're running. Netscape and IE are among the worst culprits, and I've occasionally had crashes from ICQ and Starcraft. In particular, ICQ doesn't handle losing it's 'net connection very well.
But even with those unstable apps, I only have a crash about once a week, and that's using my 8.6 iMac a couple hours a day. Certainly not up to server standards, but acceptable for a workstation.
Beos was never part of Apple's OS plan. There was rumors in 1996 or 97 of a buyout, but that was pre-Steve. And if the Be people wanted to run on the G3's they could have asked the LinuxPPC people for the specs. I'm running this on an iMac running LinuxPPC and it runs fine. How is any of this the fault of either Apple in general or Steve Jobs in particular?
The history of science is strewn with theories that come up with plausible mathematical models that turn out to be wrong experimentally. You might be able to derive chemistry from physics, but you cannot derive physics from mathematics. Math is a useful tool, but it is only a tool.
Farming today is simply not menial labor in the sense that it was 100 years ago. By no means am I disparaging the skills or value of what farmers do. But the farmer today produces food for dozens if not hundreds of people. I don't consider him a simple laborer as farmers of previous generations were.
Besides, I didn't say that menial labor is a bad thing. I was just pointing out that the amount of menial labor necessary to feed us is shrinking. True, we still have people picking fruit and such, but there are far fewer of these people than there once was, and they (or at least their children) have the opportunity to get better jobs. There's nothing wrong with being a menial laborer. But I do think that it is a good thing that fewer such people are necessary to provide for our basic needs.
That might be true for the U.S. or the rest of the developed world, but you'll notice that the original article also mentioned "Third World countries", where things are not that easy. Before buying computers, they will have to solve the slightly-more-important problem of feeding themselves..
True enough, but this is hardly a case of techonological haves and have-nots. The reasons that the third world is poor is many-fold, but a large part of it is excessive and poorly managed governments (in many cases, the leaders are outright thugs) that have screwed up the economy and impoverished their people. The US has probably donesome damage with our meddling, and I'm sure there are other causes as well. But giving these people computers is not going to get them fed, and I fail to see why a waveof Ludditism would sweep over the third world.
Really? Ask anyone working as a data operator. Or any sysadmin having to install Office 97 in a corporate network.
OK, these people make more than the minimum wage, work 40 hours a week in an air-conditioned office, and probably get sick time, health insurance, etc. There is simply no comparison to the kind of drudgery that characterized both farm and factory labor 100 years ago. Sure it sucks, but almost all work sucked a lot more in previous eras.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that things are undoubtedly better than 100 years ago, but I think that your vision of the benefits of technology in society is a bit naive. Don't forget that technology, as its name implies, is a medium, and is under control of the Powers That Be.
Absolutely. I'm not saying that technology is a cure-all for our ills. But my point is that technology is not the enemy, and it is silly to think that the poor are going to blame their misfortune on their computers. Technology can be used for evil purposes, but then the fault lies with the people using the technology, not the technology itself.
My other point is that just as pretty much anyone today is better off than pretty much anyone 100 years ago, the same will be true 50 years from now. We might not see quite the dramatic improvements that we saw in the industrial revolution, but Americans--including the poor-- will be better off. Third world countries might not improve as much, but they will improve if they adopt an American-style free market. Technology improves the lives of almost everyone exposed to it.
The bloody Technology Wars break out. Small-scale but violent conflicts erupt in many cities as technology-deprived Americans, increasingly condemned to poorly-paying menial jobs or displaced completely by computing technologies, stage riots. This unrest spreads to Third World and technologically-underveloped countries. A violent Luddite movement organizes, conducting a rash of terrorist attacks against technological targets and facilities.
This is more Katz nonsense. Economics doesn't work that way. For starters, no one is going to be "deprived of technology." Computer prices are dropping so fast that pretty soon literally anyone will be able to afford one every couple of years. And even if parents are computer-illiterate, this does not preclude their kids from becoming skilled. Furthermore, the vision of being "increasingly condemned to poorly-paying menial jobs" is exactly wrong. The trend of the last hundred years has been liberating people from that kind of job. At the turn of the century, nearly everyone was either a farmer or a factory worker. This has changed, as machines have taken over those menial jobs and freed workers for more challenging tasks.
The idea that machines will replace us all is similarly nonsense. Human labor is the most universally valuable commodity in existence. The reason that workers are replaced by machines is that those workers are too expensive. This means that mechanization is the result of an increased standard of living. It works the other way too. The ultimate determiner of wages is productivity. As more capital is accumulated, people are more productive and so employers are forced to pay them more to keep them.
You'll notice that people in those menial jobs are typically either recent immigrants or in their teens or twenties. That's because anyone with any ambition can acquire enough skills that, even if they can't live well, they can get a job that allows them to live comfortably. The march of technology *has* improved our lives, and that's true of pretty much every sector of society. I find it hard to believe that anyone would want trade places with someone in a similar social situation 100 years ago. If they did, those people will almost certainly end up working 12-hour shifts in factories or dawn-to-usk jobs on farms. Who wants that?
Sure it looks nice, but have you ever tried to find anything? They have a really obfuscated layout, and their search page is awful. For a company that makes "your internet search detective," you'd think they could make a decent search engine for their content. Their front page isn't too bad, but it's kinda sparse on actual information.
If you know of a way to boot any modern macintosh with a floppy, please email, although I'm pretty sure it is not possible.
There's a Mac OS 8.1 disk image that's small enough to fit on a floppy. This means that you can boot any non-G3 Power Mac, and probably some of the G3's as well. Obviously the fruity machines lack internal floppies, so they can't. But practically every Mac every made prior to the fruity Macs will boot from floppies.
But the point though is that every Mac since '95 has come with a built-in CD, and every copy of the Mac OS on CD is bootable. So if your computer crashes, you put in the boot CD that came with the machine, hold down "C", and away you go.
You are proving the point: none of the things you mentioned will be done by 99% of iMac users. iMac isn't targeted at developers, and so the things you do with floppies are completely irrelevant to most iMac users. I have an iMac, and I use my external floppy about once a month. I could easily get by without it.
Dilletantes who only have one machine don't need a floppy drive. They can also just buy a new laptop when the one they are using "gets full" and needs to be replaced.
So you're saying that when my hard drive "gets full" I should copy the files to floppies? Do you have any idea how many floppies it would take to store the contents of a 1 gig drive? (several hundred) I'm pretty sure you already know that, so what does this have to do with floppy drives on iMacs?
The "robber barons" are a myth. If you study the history, you'll find that these are either exaggerations and historical error or are the result of government interference.
Standard Oil is an example of a misreading of the history. They never did attain a complete monopoly. And the market share they did gain came from relentlessly improving their product and lowering their prices. They were simply more efficient than their competition, and so some companies couldn't keep up.
In fact, Standard Oil attempted to drive its remaining competitors out of business using Microsoft-like tactics. They attempted to drive the competition out of business by underselling them. But economics will tell you that this cannot work. The larger company is forced to expand production to keep up with the demand created by the lower price, and the smaller company can simply wait for the bigger company to give up.
A case of government interference is in the Western railroad industry. Advocates of antitrust like to tell stories about railroads having absolute power over farmers, and charging fares that made it impossible for farmers to make a profit. What is never mentioned was that these railroads were heavily subsidized by the government through massive land grants. Since the government gave land grants to only one railroad in a given area, it is not suprising that that railroad was the only one that served that area, as other railroad could not compete. Once the population grew to the point where more than one railroad could survive, the exploitation stopped, as farmers had a choice.
had the government not given the railroads land, the settlers would not have been fooled into going out in the middle of the wilderness where they would be utterly dependent on a single railroad. Under a free market, a railroad would not be built until the full costs of that line could be recouped in fares. And once the railroad has shelled out the money for such a line, they can't afford to risk those profits by pissing off their customers, since a competing railroad could cut into their profits.
As for the depression, this was largely caused by the incompetence of the Fed and by Roosevelt's reckless fiscal policies. As the boom of the 1920's peaked, the Fed should have held the money supply constant or even reduced it to contain the boom. Instead, they continued expanding the money supply, feeding a speculative bubble. Then, when the market crashed, the Fed should have loosened monetary policy to soften the crash. Instead, they allowed the money supply to shrink. The result was that the crash was more severe, as was the resulting Depression.
The along came FDR. His brilliant idea was that if the government does massive government spending, this would bring the economy out of its slump. It didn't work. By 1938, the economy was in another recession almost as bad as it was in 1933 when Roosevelt took office. And the government had a much larger debt burden than it had had when FDR took office. Getting out of the Depression had nothing to do with the New Deal. In fact, in 1938, Roosevelt fully expected the Depression to continue and for a Republican to win in 1940.
So the idea that we need the government to fix flaws in the market is false. The best economic system yet discovered is full, unrestricted Capitalism.
Does it occur to anyone on slashdot that the interests of Microsoft should count for anything? Let's say for the sake of argument that Microsoft has committed a crime and deserves to be punished. Does this mean that the interests of Microsoft and its employees and shareholders have no weight at all?
Forcing MS to open its OS would be a crushing blow. Windows is Microsoft's flagship product, and they have sunk billions of dollars into developing it. Regardless of what they have done wrong, simply taking things away from Microsoft willy-nilly is a very bad idea. It is every bit as destructive as would be forcing Intel to give allo of its competitors detailed specs and fab info for making PIII's.
This is not an issue of whether taking Windows away from Microsoft is good for consumers. It's an issue of what's right. The fact that Microsoft is a large corporation does not justify outright theft of their property. If Microsoft is to be punished (I don't think they should be, but that's another thread) they should be punished in a manner that is proportional to the crime committed and in a manner spelled out by law. This would possibly mean fines and/or court orders to cease the activities they have been convicted of and/or compensation to their "victims." Stealing Windows is just a knee-jerk anti-MS move and has no relationship to justice.
I seem to be on a shameless Apple-shilling streak here, but this is precisely what Apple did when it moved to the PowerPC. The first PPC Macs ran all of the 68k instruction set is software, and managed to do it so seamlessly that most users didn't even notice. This made the OS slower than it needed to be for a while, but they wrote the most critical components of the OS (particularly Quickdraw) natively in the first OS release, so that the OS didn't slow things down too much. They managed to ditch an inferior architecture completely, and the result has been that the G3's are tiny, fast, and low-power compared with PIII's and K7's. And as of 8.5, almost everything is running PPC-native, so they've left the old architecture behind completely.
AMD's problem is they'll either have to convince Microsoft to support their new instruction set and implement backwards compatibility, or they'll have to write all of that themselves. Anyone know if this can be done in a way that's OS-independent, or will the backwards-compatibility features need to be OS-specific?
The iMac had no floppy, no serial, no ADB, no SCSI, and no ROM. People complained about that, but lately I haven't heard anyone who bought one complaining. Apple's been pretty agressive about ditching archaic technologies of late, and for a while they caught a lot of flak for it. But if backwards-compatibility is holding computer back, we'll start reaping the benefits when all Macs are running a fully native OS X on multiple-processor G5's, with USB, firewire, and 100-BT ethernet as peripheral technologies.
Whatever the merits of closed versus open systems, a closed system like the Mac does allow Apple to push new technologies more aggressively.
I don't have a clue why it's done that way, but I would appreciate knowing the best way to fix it. How would I go about finding the config file that contains that setting? Do I have to remove that route in the PPP connect script, or is there a way to prevent it from being set in the first place?
consistent complexity is more usable that obfuscated simplicity.
Absolutely. There's a lot of improvment to be done on both sides. However I think the relative merits of the two approaches will differ depending on who you are. For a geek like me, I'm happy to take the time to learn about that complexity. For most users however, it is simply not worth their time. They would much prefer a one-click installation process that works 90% of the time and does 90% of what they want to one that is infinitely customizable but takes a weekend to install. Geeks' lives revolve around computers. Most other peoples' do not. So there is a substantial difference in the amount of time different people will invest in learning about their OS. If Linux is to be an OS for the masses, it must cater to the 80% of users who fall in latter category.
I just finished installing LinuxPPC on my Mac (in fact this is my first/. posting from the new OS) and I must tell you that Linux is several orders of magnitude harder to install (at least for a newbie) than the Mac OS. If you have a standard configuration, installing on a Mac is literally a matter of inserting the CD and doubleclicking. Not so with Linux. I've been using Unix regularly for a year and a half, and it still took me all day yesterday to install it. On a Mac, you don't have to worry about repartitioning your drive, setting up users, manually configuring PPP (I had to screw around with the routing table, I'm not sure you can even look at the routing table on a Mac.) and lots of other BS. I shudder at having a non-geek attempt this process. Few would have the patience. This is not to say that Linux needs to be dumbed down for everyone, but I wonder if there isn't still work that needs to be done to make the process easier for non-technical users. I'm running LinuxPPC 1999, reportedly one of the easier-to-install distros, and I'd say there's still a lot of work to be done. Ideally, there should be a single graphical install that walks you through partitioning, installation, and configuration. It would also be a great help to have Mac-style control panels for many features. This is anathema to the traditional Linux power user's way of doing things, and I'm not sure I'd want to do it that way, but if Linux is going to go mainstream, that's what needs to happen. Most people don't have an entire day to devote to installing a new OS on their computers, and most users would have a lot more trouble with it than I did under the current system. People simply do not have the time or the interest to learn in detail about the internals of their computers. If Linux is going to take over the world, it needs to accomodate that.
Even the most ardent geeks complain that they can never be out of touch, never have time to think, never completely catch up. As the world is able to reach us more easily, it expects us to be always available and more or less instantly responsive. This rushes us and our responses. It makes us edgy, grumpy, impulsive. Technology becomes a means of harassing and pressuring us instead of improving our lives. The genuine blessings of technology - information, opportunity, community, the portability of work - get overlooked in all the gadgetry.
This is complete hogwash. I'm an "ardent geek" and I have no troubles "keeping up." I'm still in school, so perhaps that has something to do with it, but the fact that people can communicate with me does not force me to deal with it immediately. I'm not "edgy, grumpy, and impulsive." Heck, I *like* the ability to communicate quickly, deal with problems immediately, and get answers in no time flat.
Once again, Katz comes through with nonsensical tripe. Modern technology is not a problem. Yes, it requires us to learn new skills, but that's what we as human beings do best. I think Katz would change his tune real fast if he were forced to live in ages past. echnology improves our lives immesurably in many, many ways. The good old days are now.
Cars were once impractical, so were planes, electricity, running water, computers and basicly everything else you use all the time.
And they were developed because individuals thought they could turn a profit. Cars and planes were private, electricity was largely private, and computers, while they were government funded initially, didn't have much of an impact until private semiconductor companies started mass producing them.
Keep in mind that there is an infinite number of things that could lead to the benefit of mankind. Deciding which ones should be pursued is best done by the market. Space travel will continue without the government because companies need satellites. And when companies are paying their own way, they'll have more incentive to cut costs.
NASA is inhibiting progress by subsidizing space travel and thereby taking away the incentive for innovation. We would be better off without it. The military and limited space research can be taken into orbit on private carriers, and in the long run, the result will be lower costs and more activity in space.
So dismissing the field is not "naive." It's a recognition of opportunity costs. Yes space exploration is cool, but so are a whole lot of other things. As long as taxpayers are forced to pay for it, we cannot know whether space travel can be cost effective.
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Are you on crack? I mean, this is bad. It'd be like any drug dealer with lots of cash lobbying for a cut in the DEA budget.
I'd like to see the DEA eliminated and drugs relegalized. So I don't see anything terribly wrong with this.
And besides, your web page sucks.
It gets the job done.
If you were arrested for selling drugs and sentenced to jail time, would you be lobbying your state or local government to cut the funding for the police department?
Absolutely, at least the drug-enforcement wing of it. Of course, as a Libertarian, I'd do it even if I didn't use drugs. (which I don't)
They are in court because the DOJ believes they broke the law.
And like laws against cocaine use, this is an unjust law, and Microsoft is justified in doing anything necessary (within reason) to fight it. If that includes lobbying for lower DOJ funding, so be it.
Keep in mind that lobbying bans would apply to the "good" people as well as the interest peddlers. The tree-huggers, tax cutters, gun lobbyists, anti-war protestors, free speech advocates, and all the other groups that push legitimate political agendas would be barred from discussion as well. The result would not be that citizens would have more power, but simply that people have to find more clever ways of influencing legislators. Remember that every lobbyist represents *somebody,* and often the lobbyist is representing an honest group of citizens who are taking a position on a real political issue.
I think the result of a ban would be two-fold. First, most of the bad guys would ignore it. There are lots of ways to get around this sort of laws, as the "soft money" fiasco has shown. Adding more restrictions will simply make it easier for the entranched players to harass newcomers, and won't slow the special interests down much sincethey do this sort of thing for a living.
Secondly, it will give more power to the media and to campaign contributers, both of which already have enourmous influence over the system.
So I think a lobbying ban is a stupid idea. There are already laws limiting the most corrupt behaviors, and the rest will have to be dealt with through the electoral process. As long as the government has $2 trillion in goodies to hand out and the power to ruin people's lives, lobbyists will flock to Washington to get their share. Only eliminating the goodies these people are after can solve the problem, and that's not going to happen any time soon.
I must say, I see nothing improper about this. It looks to me like a simple self-defense move. They're doing everything they can to avoid getting screwed over. If the DoJ is going to harass them, why shouldn't they fight back?
and at that time, what would the BULK of PPC buyers have run as an OS on those kick-ass Moto G3 boxes? Certainly not Mac OS, because Moto would have driven their asses out of business.
Why can't Apple just raise the liscencing costs on the new machines to cover some of the losses in their own product line? In the long run, the Mac OS *is* Apple's most valuable asset. Even with the pathetic state System 7 was in, they still had a loyal customer base that was attached more than anything else to Apple's OS. That means that anything Apple could do to grow the platform would have benefitted them in the long run.
Not only that, but giving Moto a stake in the platform would have given them much more incentive to make better PPC chips. And it would benefit Apple by allowing them to share some of the R & D costs. Particularly with the open hardware standards of CHRP, Apple could easily require some kind of technology-sharing arrangement whereby Apple gets to liscence any advances by cloners for cheap.
So I think clone-killing was dumb. The success of the clones was simply proof that Apple's hardware was falling behind the cutting edge. Better to get that lesson from someone who's dependent on you, than to wait for people to start defecting to Wintel, and likely never come back. The clones gave Apple both an alternative revenue stream and a less damaging feedback mechanism and technology source. A flourishing PPC clone market combined with LinuxPPC & Mac OS X would have been very sweet. As it is, the PPC platform can't keep up with the sheer competitiveness of the Wintel world.
Apple screwed Moto over big time when they killed the clones. Moto had a kick-ass G3 system waiting in the wings about 6 months before Apple's own systems were ready, and Apple killed it to prevent the market share loss. That machine was faster than Apple's first G3's months later, so it would've been a major coup for the platform and a major money-maker for Motorolla. Instead, they forced Motorolla to take a loss on all of the R & D costs for the machine so Apple's machines wouldn't look bad. I don't blame Motorolla for being pissed off.
I've found that instability is largely determined by the apps you're running. Netscape and IE are among the worst culprits, and I've occasionally had crashes from ICQ and Starcraft. In particular, ICQ doesn't handle losing it's 'net connection very well.
But even with those unstable apps, I only have a crash about once a week, and that's using my 8.6 iMac a couple hours a day. Certainly not up to server standards, but acceptable for a workstation.
Beos was never part of Apple's OS plan. There was rumors in 1996 or 97 of a buyout, but that was pre-Steve. And if the Be people wanted to run on the G3's they could have asked the LinuxPPC people for the specs. I'm running this on an iMac running LinuxPPC and it runs fine. How is any of this the fault of either Apple in general or Steve Jobs in particular?
The history of science is strewn with theories that come up with plausible mathematical models that turn out to be wrong experimentally. You might be able to derive chemistry from physics, but you cannot derive physics from mathematics. Math is a useful tool, but it is only a tool.
Farming today is simply not menial labor in the sense that it was 100 years ago. By no means am I disparaging the skills or value of what farmers do. But the farmer today produces food for dozens if not hundreds of people. I don't consider him a simple laborer as farmers of previous generations were.
Besides, I didn't say that menial labor is a bad thing. I was just pointing out that the amount of menial labor necessary to feed us is shrinking. True, we still have people picking fruit and such, but there are far fewer of these people than there once was, and they (or at least their children) have the opportunity to get better jobs. There's nothing wrong with being a menial laborer. But I do think that it is a good thing that fewer such people are necessary to provide for our basic needs.
That might be true for the U.S. or the rest of the developed world, but you'll notice that the original article also mentioned "Third World countries", where things are not that easy. Before buying computers, they will have to solve the slightly-more-important problem of feeding themselves..
True enough, but this is hardly a case of techonological haves and have-nots. The reasons that the third world is poor is many-fold, but a large part of it is excessive and poorly managed governments (in many cases, the leaders are outright thugs) that have screwed up the economy and impoverished their people. The US has probably donesome damage with our meddling, and I'm sure there are other causes as well. But giving these people computers is not going to get them fed, and I fail to see why a waveof Ludditism would sweep over the third world.
Really? Ask anyone working as a data operator. Or any sysadmin having to install Office 97 in a corporate network.
OK, these people make more than the minimum wage, work 40 hours a week in an air-conditioned office, and probably get sick time, health insurance, etc. There is simply no comparison to the kind of drudgery that characterized both farm and factory labor 100 years ago. Sure it sucks, but almost all work sucked a lot more in previous eras.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that things are undoubtedly better than 100 years ago, but I think that your vision of the benefits of technology in society is a bit naive. Don't forget that technology, as its name implies, is a medium, and is under control of the Powers That Be.
Absolutely. I'm not saying that technology is a cure-all for our ills. But my point is that technology is not the enemy, and it is silly to think that the poor are going to blame their misfortune on their computers. Technology can be used for evil purposes, but then the fault lies with the people using the technology, not the technology itself.
My other point is that just as pretty much anyone today is better off than pretty much anyone 100 years ago, the same will be true 50 years from now. We might not see quite the dramatic improvements that we saw in the industrial revolution, but Americans--including the poor-- will be better off. Third world countries might not improve as much, but they will improve if they adopt an American-style free market. Technology improves the lives of almost everyone exposed to it.
The bloody Technology Wars break out. Small-scale but violent conflicts erupt in many cities as technology-deprived Americans, increasingly condemned to poorly-paying menial jobs or displaced completely by computing technologies, stage riots. This unrest spreads to Third World and technologically-underveloped countries. A violent Luddite movement organizes, conducting a rash of terrorist attacks against technological targets and facilities.
This is more Katz nonsense. Economics doesn't work that way. For starters, no one is going to be "deprived of technology." Computer prices are dropping so fast that pretty soon literally anyone will be able to afford one every couple of years. And even if parents are computer-illiterate, this does not preclude their kids from becoming skilled. Furthermore, the vision of being "increasingly condemned to poorly-paying menial jobs" is exactly wrong. The trend of the last hundred years has been liberating people from that kind of job. At the turn of the century, nearly everyone was either a farmer or a factory worker. This has changed, as machines have taken over those menial jobs and freed workers for more challenging tasks.
The idea that machines will replace us all is similarly nonsense. Human labor is the most universally valuable commodity in existence. The reason that workers are replaced by machines is that those workers are too expensive. This means that mechanization is the result of an increased standard of living. It works the other way too. The ultimate determiner of wages is productivity. As more capital is accumulated, people are more productive and so employers are forced to pay them more to keep them.
You'll notice that people in those menial jobs are typically either recent immigrants or in their teens or twenties. That's because anyone with any ambition can acquire enough skills that, even if they can't live well, they can get a job that allows them to live comfortably. The march of technology *has* improved our lives, and that's true of pretty much every sector of society. I find it hard to believe that anyone would want trade places with someone in a similar social situation 100 years ago. If they did, those people will almost certainly end up working 12-hour shifts in factories or dawn-to-usk jobs on farms. Who wants that?
Sure it looks nice, but have you ever tried to find anything? They have a really obfuscated layout, and their search page is awful. For a company that makes "your internet search detective," you'd think they could make a decent search engine for their content. Their front page isn't too bad, but it's kinda sparse on actual information.
If you know of a way to boot any modern macintosh with a floppy, please email, although I'm pretty sure it is not possible.
There's a Mac OS 8.1 disk image that's small enough to fit on a floppy. This means that you can boot any non-G3 Power Mac, and probably some of the G3's as well. Obviously the fruity machines lack internal floppies, so they can't. But practically every Mac every made prior to the fruity Macs will boot from floppies.
But the point though is that every Mac since '95 has come with a built-in CD, and every copy of the Mac OS on CD is bootable. So if your computer crashes, you put in the boot CD that came with the machine, hold down "C", and away you go.
Imation makes the superdrive.
Imomega makes the zip drive.
You are proving the point: none of the things you mentioned will be done by 99% of iMac users. iMac isn't targeted at developers, and so the things you do with floppies are completely irrelevant to most iMac users. I have an iMac, and I use my external floppy about once a month. I could easily get by without it.
Dilletantes who only have one machine don't need a floppy drive. They can also just buy a new laptop when the one they are using "gets full" and needs to be replaced.
So you're saying that when my hard drive "gets full" I should copy the files to floppies? Do you have any idea how many floppies it would take to store the contents of a 1 gig drive? (several hundred) I'm pretty sure you already know that, so what does this have to do with floppy drives on iMacs?
The "robber barons" are a myth. If you study the history, you'll find that these are either exaggerations and historical error or are the result of government interference.
Standard Oil is an example of a misreading of the history. They never did attain a complete monopoly. And the market share they did gain came from relentlessly improving their product and lowering their prices. They were simply more efficient than their competition, and so some companies couldn't keep up.
In fact, Standard Oil attempted to drive its remaining competitors out of business using Microsoft-like tactics. They attempted to drive the competition out of business by underselling them. But economics will tell you that this cannot work. The larger company is forced to expand production to keep up with the demand created by the lower price, and the smaller company can simply wait for the bigger company to give up.
A case of government interference is in the Western railroad industry. Advocates of antitrust like to tell stories about railroads having absolute power over farmers, and charging fares that made it impossible for farmers to make a profit. What is never mentioned was that these railroads were heavily subsidized by the government through massive land grants. Since the government gave land grants to only one railroad in a given area, it is not suprising that that railroad was the only one that served that area, as other railroad could not compete. Once the population grew to the point where more than one railroad could survive, the exploitation stopped, as farmers had a choice.
had the government not given the railroads land, the settlers would not have been fooled into going out in the middle of the wilderness where they would be utterly dependent on a single railroad. Under a free market, a railroad would not be built until the full costs of that line could be recouped in fares. And once the railroad has shelled out the money for such a line, they can't afford to risk those profits by pissing off their customers, since a competing railroad could cut into their profits.
As for the depression, this was largely caused by the incompetence of the Fed and by Roosevelt's reckless fiscal policies. As the boom of the 1920's peaked, the Fed should have held the money supply constant or even reduced it to contain the boom. Instead, they continued expanding the money supply, feeding a speculative bubble. Then, when the market crashed, the Fed should have loosened monetary policy to soften the crash. Instead, they allowed the money supply to shrink. The result was that the crash was more severe, as was the resulting Depression.
The along came FDR. His brilliant idea was that if the government does massive government spending, this would bring the economy out of its slump. It didn't work. By 1938, the economy was in another recession almost as bad as it was in 1933 when Roosevelt took office. And the government had a much larger debt burden than it had had when FDR took office. Getting out of the Depression had nothing to do with the New Deal. In fact, in 1938, Roosevelt fully expected the Depression to continue and for a Republican to win in 1940.
So the idea that we need the government to fix flaws in the market is false. The best economic system yet discovered is full, unrestricted Capitalism.
Does it occur to anyone on slashdot that the interests of Microsoft should count for anything? Let's say for the sake of argument that Microsoft has committed a crime and deserves to be punished. Does this mean that the interests of Microsoft and its employees and shareholders have no weight at all?
Forcing MS to open its OS would be a crushing blow. Windows is Microsoft's flagship product, and they have sunk billions of dollars into developing it. Regardless of what they have done wrong, simply taking things away from Microsoft willy-nilly is a very bad idea. It is every bit as destructive as would be forcing Intel to give allo of its competitors detailed specs and fab info for making PIII's.
This is not an issue of whether taking Windows away from Microsoft is good for consumers. It's an issue of what's right. The fact that Microsoft is a large corporation does not justify outright theft of their property. If Microsoft is to be punished (I don't think they should be, but that's another thread) they should be punished in a manner that is proportional to the crime committed and in a manner spelled out by law. This would possibly mean fines and/or court orders to cease the activities they have been convicted of and/or compensation to their "victims." Stealing Windows is just a knee-jerk anti-MS move and has no relationship to justice.
I seem to be on a shameless Apple-shilling streak here, but this is precisely what Apple did when it moved to the PowerPC. The first PPC Macs ran all of the 68k instruction set is software, and managed to do it so seamlessly that most users didn't even notice. This made the OS slower than it needed to be for a while, but they wrote the most critical components of the OS (particularly Quickdraw) natively in the first OS release, so that the OS didn't slow things down too much. They managed to ditch an inferior architecture completely, and the result has been that the G3's are tiny, fast, and low-power compared with PIII's and K7's. And as of 8.5, almost everything is running PPC-native, so they've left the old architecture behind completely.
AMD's problem is they'll either have to convince Microsoft to support their new instruction set and implement backwards compatibility, or they'll have to write all of that themselves. Anyone know if this can be done in a way that's OS-independent, or will the backwards-compatibility features need to be OS-specific?
The iMac had no floppy, no serial, no ADB, no SCSI, and no ROM. People complained about that, but lately I haven't heard anyone who bought one complaining. Apple's been pretty agressive about ditching archaic technologies of late, and for a while they caught a lot of flak for it. But if backwards-compatibility is holding computer back, we'll start reaping the benefits when all Macs are running a fully native OS X on multiple-processor G5's, with USB, firewire, and 100-BT ethernet as peripheral technologies.
Whatever the merits of closed versus open systems, a closed system like the Mac does allow Apple to push new technologies more aggressively.
I don't have a clue why it's done that way, but I would appreciate knowing the best way to fix it. How would I go about finding the config file that contains that setting? Do I have to remove that route in the PPP connect script, or is there a way to prevent it from being set in the first place?
consistent complexity is more usable that obfuscated simplicity.
Absolutely. There's a lot of improvment to be done on both sides. However I think the relative merits of the two approaches will differ depending on who you are. For a geek like me, I'm happy to take the time to learn about that complexity. For most users however, it is simply not worth their time. They would much prefer a one-click installation process that works 90% of the time and does 90% of what they want to one that is infinitely customizable but takes a weekend to install. Geeks' lives revolve around computers. Most other peoples' do not. So there is a substantial difference in the amount of time different people will invest in learning about their OS. If Linux is to be an OS for the masses, it must cater to the 80% of users who fall in latter category.
I just finished installing LinuxPPC on my Mac (in fact this is my first /. posting from the new OS) and I must tell you that Linux is several orders of magnitude harder to install (at least for a newbie) than the Mac OS. If you have a standard configuration, installing on a Mac is literally a matter of inserting the CD and doubleclicking. Not so with Linux. I've been using Unix regularly for a year and a half, and it still took me all day yesterday to install it. On a Mac, you don't have to worry about repartitioning your drive, setting up users, manually configuring PPP (I had to screw around with the routing table, I'm not sure you can even look at the routing table on a Mac.) and lots of other BS. I shudder at having a non-geek attempt this process. Few would have the patience. This is not to say that Linux needs to be dumbed down for everyone, but I wonder if there isn't still work that needs to be done to make the process easier for non-technical users. I'm running LinuxPPC 1999, reportedly one of the easier-to-install distros, and I'd say there's still a lot of work to be done. Ideally, there should be a single graphical install that walks you through partitioning, installation, and configuration. It would also be a great help to have Mac-style control panels for many features. This is anathema to the traditional Linux power user's way of doing things, and I'm not sure I'd want to do it that way, but if Linux is going to go mainstream, that's what needs to happen. Most people don't have an entire day to devote to installing a new OS on their computers, and most users would have a lot more trouble with it than I did under the current system. People simply do not have the time or the interest to learn in detail about the internals of their computers. If Linux is going to take over the world, it needs to accomodate that.
Even the most ardent geeks complain that they can never be out of touch, never have time to think, never completely catch up. As the world is able to reach us more easily, it expects us to be always available and more or less instantly responsive. This rushes us and our responses. It makes us edgy, grumpy, impulsive. Technology becomes a means of harassing and pressuring us instead of improving our lives. The genuine blessings of technology - information, opportunity, community, the portability of work - get overlooked in all the gadgetry.
This is complete hogwash. I'm an "ardent geek" and I have no troubles "keeping up." I'm still in school, so perhaps that has something to do with it, but the fact that people can communicate with me does not force me to deal with it immediately. I'm not "edgy, grumpy, and impulsive." Heck, I *like* the ability to communicate quickly, deal with problems immediately, and get answers in no time flat.
Once again, Katz comes through with nonsensical tripe. Modern technology is not a problem. Yes, it requires us to learn new skills, but that's what we as human beings do best. I think Katz would change his tune real fast if he were forced to live in ages past. echnology improves our lives immesurably in many, many ways. The good old days are now.
Cars were once impractical, so were planes, electricity, running water, computers and basicly everything else you use all the time.
And they were developed because individuals thought they could turn a profit. Cars and planes were private, electricity was largely private, and computers, while they were government funded initially, didn't have much of an impact until private semiconductor companies started mass producing them.
Keep in mind that there is an infinite number of things that could lead to the benefit of mankind. Deciding which ones should be pursued is best done by the market. Space travel will continue without the government because companies need satellites. And when companies are paying their own way, they'll have more incentive to cut costs.
NASA is inhibiting progress by subsidizing space travel and thereby taking away the incentive for innovation. We would be better off without it. The military and limited space research can be taken into orbit on private carriers, and in the long run, the result will be lower costs and more activity in space.
So dismissing the field is not "naive." It's a recognition of opportunity costs. Yes space exploration is cool, but so are a whole lot of other things. As long as taxpayers are forced to pay for it, we cannot know whether space travel can be cost effective.